


Chopsticks

by somekindofseizure



Category: The X-Files
Genre: MSR, prompts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-08
Updated: 2016-06-08
Packaged: 2018-07-13 21:04:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,278
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7137047
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/somekindofseizure/pseuds/somekindofseizure
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>From a prompt for "chopsticks" and "fingers."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Chopsticks

His phone trills twice, in harmony – high, through the plastic phone, and then lower, through the thin motel wall.  She stares at it, as if trying to see what he’s doing on the other side.  The paint is flaking off in chunks, leaving behind swaths of sheetrock in the shapes of states she’s driven through beside him: Tennessee, Florida, New Jersey.

“Does your TV work?” she asks when he finally picks up.  “I had too much Diet Coke with dinner.  I’m at least an hour away from sleeping.”

“Haven’t tried it, let me see.”  The springs of his bed moan woefully as he shifts to reach for the remote and then there is the staticky scream of a mountain-town, rabbit-eared television.

“Are you going to sleep yet?” she asks.

“Nope.  Come on over, soda pop.”

“Shut up.”

She hangs up with intentions of going directly to his room, but her eyes graze her reflection in the mirrored closet door, and the sight gives her pause.  He’s seen it all before – braless beneath pink silk pajamas, freckles splayed like countryside stars.  But something makes her think twice about showing it all to him again.  Lately, she feels the need to hide.

Tossing her silk top on the bed, she pulls a long-sleeved navy blue t-shirt over her arms.  It only gets as far as her elbows before she shimmies out of it, reaches for her road-weary bra; she can almost hear the underwire heave a sigh as she puts it back to work.  Maybe with its satiny black straps, it can control her feelings, shape her confusion with its little pink bow.

Mulder opens the door mid-knock so that her fist is left mid-air for a moment and she nearly taps his chest  His hair is messy and damp at the roots, white t-shirt sloping over his arms, sweats slung low on his hips.  She blinks double time and looks nervously at the floor.  He has been working out.  Or something.

“What happened?  You take the long way around from next door?” he asks.  

She walks past him, slightly irritated at his innocence.  There is nothing to indicate he second-guessed his clothes, put a bra back on, whatever the male equivalent of that is.  She looks around a bit anxiously.  There is nowhere to sit but the bed.   _Of course_ , she chides herself as she considers going back to her room, _it’s a motel_.  In his company, she’s shared motel beds for no reason more times than she’s shared a bed with anyone else for a good one.  

And then on some otherwise unremarkable day, she noticed the way she tingled when he touched her back, or flinched when he reached over to pluck a leaf from her hair.  Some otherwise forgettable night, her mind wandered through crusty bathroom grout and pondered the sound of strong water pressure pounding his skin.  She blamed convenience, the laziness of her subconscious, reaching for the most accessible material.  Her sexual fantasy bank had been steadily depleting for years.

She sits on the edge of the mattress, anchoring her feet to the floor.  He’s behind her, leaning against the headboard.

“What are you doing?  You’re going to watch TV like that?”  

She chews her cheek and turns, crawling up the mattress self-consciously.  At least she has the bra on.  Once she’s beside him, knees folded up, they descend into safety, staring at the TV absentmindedly as Mulder flicks through channels, each grittier and more numbing than the last.  Beside him, a dim, dusty lamp drones like a third companion.  But then, Mulder abruptly turns the TV off.

“Nothing on.”

She nods, hands folded in her lap.   “Cards?”

“Didn’t bring ‘em,” he says.  “Wanna do that thing where you read me a page from one of your books and I guess the title?”

“I forgot my books.  Or I wouldn’t be in here.”  

“Twenty questions,” he suggests.

“You answer all the questions with more questions,” she says.

He thinks, taps his knee.

“Wanna play chopsticks?  Haven’t done that in a while.”  

She’s always loved the efficiency of this game they invented – killing time while also making use of that extra set of utensils provided with Chinese takeout.  The chopstick acts as a pencil or paintbrush.  They used to use hands or forearms as canvases, but Mulder complained her tiny hand wasn’t a big enough surface for his artwork, so they graduated to backs.  Over-the-shirt, of course.

Now he pads barefoot over to the table where they slurped lo mein earlier.  The smell of the food still sticks to the raw carpet, even with the window cracked.  He slips the chopsticks out of the paper and holds them out, waiting for her to take her end and pull.  There is an even crack down the middle like a wishbone, and for a moment feels like herself again.  A hundred times, they have done this. _It is no different._

“You first,” she says, and he lays flat down on his stomach, his toes hanging over the end of the double bed.  She sits beside him and begins to trace the point of the chopstick over his shirt.

“Here,” he says and lifts his belly off the creaky bed.  He rips the hem of the t-shirt up to his armpits, revealing the toned, tan muscles of his back.  She wonders if he’s been running with his shirt off.  

“What are you doing?” she asks.

“It’s harder to guess with the cloth in the way.”

It used to be that the guesser got the points, then they changed it so the points went to the artist.  Then it was changed so that difficulty level of the drawing received a numeric value, which impacted the overall score of each player.  It eventually got so complicated they stopped keeping score.

But he’s still an aggressive guesser and begins as soon as the instrument strikes his bare skin.   Submarine.  Cucumber.  Weimaraner.  She does the broad strokes holding it like a paintbrush, then switches to pencil style to do the details.  The fleshy part of her hand dots his skin.  He is so smooth...

“Hey,” he says and she startles, clears her throat.  “Your hand is muddying the drawing.”

“I’m trying to do the windows.”

“Airplane!”  

She sighs, pretending not to care that she accidentally gave him a clue.  He  grins, cheek pressing into the mattress.

“Right.”  Her eyes settle in the hollow of his shoulders and she imagines lying her head there, imagines herself falling asleep there, imagines scraping the underside of his shoulder blade with her nose–

“Erase me,” he says.

She swishes her hand over his back, clearing it like an Etch-a-Sketch, resisting the urge to gather his skin in her fist like fabric.  She realizes he is holding his breath and does not want to wonder why.  She lifts her hand, leaving a few windows behind, and hastily takes her position on her belly.  He rolls onto his side, leans up on an elbow, and pinches the cotton of her shirt loose at her waist.  

“It’s easier to guess,” he tells her.  “And you need all the help you can get.”

She rolls the shirt up beneath her bra strap and places her arms on the bed up around her face.  His breath forms a tiny O-shape on her arm and she grins – he’s blowing on the tip of his chopstick.

“Don’t get carried away,” she warns.  “There’s no protective layer there now.”

“I’m not the one who once pressed so hard she injected a splinter into my palm.”

“I got it out for you, didn’t I?”

But his stroke is light and even, starts just below her shoulder blade, sweeps down the imaginary parallel plane beside her spine.  More lines, then something swirly at the top.

“The symbol for Pi.”

“Pi is your first guess no matter what I draw.”  

The chopstick tracks to her lower back and her tailbone twitches.  Wavy, long strokes straggling and spanning her sacrum like mermaid hair.  She squeezes her thighs together tightly to contain the heat building there.  She opens her mouth, trying to ease the pressure quietly, like letting out a balloon in order to tie the knot.  The edge of his other hand comes down beneath the elastic of her pajama pants.  He holds them just above the crack of her ass.

“That okay?”  

For a moment, she thinks he sounds different, sounds like his mind has also betrayed him with thoughts he can’t control, fantasies of fucking her in the shower.  She breathes quicker, licking a lip in panic.  Her face is already tucked behind her elbow, but she inches it further into the crux.

“Mmhm, fine.”

“Nothing?  Not one guess?”  He sounds normal again now.

“Nn nn.”  

Out the corner of an eye and over her arm, she sees that he’s narrowing his eyes at his work and she cowers under their intensity, turning her face the other way, catching her reflection in the mirror.  He sticks a thumb up between her shoulder blades and staves her shirt up a little higher.  He takes the clasp of her bra in hand and pulls it up from her skin.

“Do you mind?”

“No.”  It’s a whisper, barely audible.  In the mirror, the smallest soft sliver of breast appears from under the hem of her shirt.  Armor so cautiously applied, so easily removed.

“Bigger canvas,” he mutters.

He pulls the chopstick across her back toward his chest and drops the tool into the trough of her spine, favoring his finger.  She has often wondered why they didn’t just do it this way, why the interloping chopstick.  But as the warmth of his touch radiates through her body, it curls her toes up tight, clenches her jaw, floods her chest, and she knows the answer.

“Fingers are not regulation,” she says and hardly recognizes her voice.  He looks over her back and catches her eyes in the hazy, bruised mirror.  She clears her throat.  Erase.  Erase.

“A tree,” she guesses.

“What kind?”

“Jacaranda.”

“How do you know?”

“You drew the flowers falling off.  And you made them purple.”  

He chuckles and flattens his palm against her back, spanning the width of it to erase his work.  His fingertips slip under the edge of her pants and her breath jumps.

“The roots were down here.”  

“I got that.”

He keeps erasing and erasing, at first tentatively, like he’s waiting for her to stop him.  But then his touch grows rhythmic and confident.  She closes her eyes, hums, and he continues… and… continues.  Finally, he stops, shuts the light off and lies down.  He must think she’s fallen asleep.  And she might have, if she were not reeling with desire.

She waits a few minutes, then rotates slowly onto her back, in quarter turns, careful not to upset the mattress.  The material of her pants shifts and she feels the wet silk swipe at her leg.  As she lies on her back, she realizes her right hand - her good hand - has wound up right beside his left one, just barely touching it.  

She leaves it there, teasing herself with the nearness of him, and uses her left hand instead.  Slowly and quietly, she breaches the boundary of her pajama pants, listening for the speed of his breath to make sure he’s asleep.  Her touch is awkward, wrong-handed, but she is also armed with the memory of his hand under the elastic on her back, the sight of his pants revealing the line of his pelvic muscle.  She imagines him sliding that hand over her ass and curving it – _oh God_ – her ribs contract, and she turns her face away from him so he won’t feel the strong pulse of her breath.

She is so focused on the thought of touching him that she almost thinks she imagines his left hand consuming her idle right one.  Her heart nearly stops as he squeezes.  Firmly enough to mean stop.  Firmly enough to mean keep going.  She tries to slow her breath, body rising and falling beneath her rolled up shirt and still-undone, loosely tacked bra.  The entitled impertinence of her desire is quickly ceding way to embarrassment.  She doesn’t dare look at him as she waits for him to speak.

He says nothing, but drags her limp hand over her waist.  Her belly dips at his touch, buckling and creaking like their mattress under the weight of anticipation, whispers from her library of sexual fantasy now roaring in her ears.  She finally returns the grip on his hand as he pokes their intertwined fingers beneath her pajamas in the tent created by her left arm.  A shiver runs up the center of her body.

“Use your good hand,” he whispers and takes his back.  She hesitates, bringing her left to her thigh.  But then she feels the brush of something other than a hand – a chopstick.  It runs up her arm, across her collarbone.  It traverses her sternum, down between her breasts, and tickles her belly, before it swivels and travels back up under her shirt.  It stops finally at the center panel of her bra, lifting it up beneath the bow and peeling the cups off her skin.  She exhales hard as her whole body ignites, rumbles to a start, and her right hand accelerates.  

“Want to guess?” he whispers.

“No,” she rasps, finally looking at him.  His eyes are boring into her, dark and demanding, well-hidden feelings peeking out from beneath the heavy carpet of lashes.  The chopstick rounds her hardened nipple as her whole body curls and stretches.

“Fingers should be regulation,” is the last thing he whispers before she comes.

 

 


End file.
